Font Forum

The current Preview (F8) panel is very smart. Like the glyph display, it figures out things like contours with incorrect direction and fixes it in the preview. Unfortunately, this is not how the vast majority of OpenType renderers work, so it looks like the font has fewer problems than it really will when used.

The preview renderer for MainType (and the one for "Test OTF/TTF") is not as smart...it works much more like most applications. Adding this renderer to the FontCreator preview with a toggle button somewhere in the Preview window would allow users to better see what the font will really look like when used, without having to do the "Test OTF/TTF". In addition, it would still allow use of OpenType features, which the "Test OTF/TTF" window does not.

Please try the Test Web Font.

Test as OTF uses a Windows control, which has limited support for OpenType Features.

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 5:55 am Please try the Test Web Font.

This is limited by the installed default browser, most of which do not support all OpenType features. To be more helpful, "Test WOFF" should have a way to open in an arbitrary browser.

Also, it's yet another window that has to be opened, which is silly when there is a window already open that can do the same job.

MainType uses Windows to rasterize the font, so to use it we have to export and install the font which is exactly what Test TTF/OTF does.

Erwin Denissen wrote: ↑Thu Jul 26, 2018 2:52 pm MainType uses Windows to rasterize the font, so to use it we have to export and install the font which is exactly what Test TTF/OTF does.

Then, is there a way you can disable the "smart" bits of the FontCreator preview, and allow the user to toggle it (with the default being "smart")?

The biggest ones I notice are the fixing of contours with incorrect direction, and some changes to line spacing metrics when those in the font file are very weird. I also see better handling of missing characters. Other previews (like Windows) sometimes show huge gaps or extra line breaks when characters aren't encoded in the font, but the FontCreator preview does much better, even if the font doesn't have a .notdef character.

So, to sum it up, I like the "smart" preview, in that it does work really well, but having a built-in "dumber" preview to choose from with support for OpenType features would be nice.

You could try to change the glyph outline fill mode:

Erwin Denissen wrote: ↑Fri Jul 27, 2018 12:09 pm You could try to change the glyph outline fill mode:

This affects too many things, including validation. By changing it, FontCreator will completely miss some incorrect contours that it now finds. It will also see others as "incorrect direction", even though they are not.

It only uses a different algorithm for drawing overlapping contours.

This is the only setting available.